Game: Empire of the Dead - upcoming West Wind game!

Monday, February 14, 2011

Empire of the Dead - upcoming West Wind game!

This is the first piece of information, on the internet as a whole I think? First heard about that West Wind was working on a new horror project late last year from Wendy Cooper at West Wind as I mentioned the Gothic Horror range in one of my emails. I find the Gothic Horror range absolutely fantastic, not only do the models look damn good and be full of character but the range covers so much odd/weird stuff that I instantly decided to use it back during last summer when I was scouting alternate sources of miniatures for my Malifaux Resurrectionist gang. And I'm not just saying that, if you've been following my blog then probably 60% of what's been shown has been West Wind produced Gothic Horror range stuff.

Now the range of miniatures had some kind of rules, called Gothic Horror, which I have not tried and they are out of production and stock so you can't get them anymore. So I asked if there would be something else to fill the void since the miniatures deserve a ruleset.

And as it happens West Wind were working on a new book with a Gothic Horror theme, after a few emails I got a couple of Andy Coopers artwork pictures and he answered a couple of my questions to go with the artwork should I post it online so that at least you can get a general idea what the game will be like.

The new rules will be called Empire of the Dead and Andy Cooper wrote that West Wind has been working on this project for 2 years so there is a lot of work put into this. He is also the artist behind all the artwork that will appear in the book - some artwork samples are included in this post.

Below are my 5 questions which Andy answered. They are very general in character, as I didn't know how far the project had come by the point I was writing them - and I was also suspecting that West Wind would like to keep the details under wraps a while longer.

1) Is this a completely new game or the Gothic Horror rules remade?

Its a completely new game

2) Any roughly estimated release date?

Its Pencilled in for Summer 2011 but I expect to see it in September

3) Will be a new line of miniatures or if you guys will use the Gothic Horror range with the rules?

There is indeed a New Range of Miniatures, Gothic Horror is also useable for the game , in fact its essential .

4) A rough number of miniatures per side required to play?

Small gangs of 8 Minis a side

5) Read that the Gothic Horror rules used various kinds of dice (I love that kind of stuff), will that re-appear in in Empire of the Dead or is it D6 based only?

Empire of the Dead uses D10 ‘s

Now a couple of things that make me excited.

First of all, it's a new Gothic Horror game obviously!
But I will pretty much already have a big painted up collection of their models so once it gets released I won't have to start from scratch! I can only assume that goes for anyone of you guys out there who already have a collection of Gothic Horror stuff as well. If you aren't familiar with either West Wind or their Gothic Horror range you need to head over and check it out.

The range includes everything from Jack the Ripper, Werewolves, 19th century civilians, killer Scarecrows, monsters, weird stuff and freaks. The range and variety of models i amazing and you can pretty much use the range for numerous projects, settings and games. I use the Gothic Horror stuff for Strange Aeons, Malifaux and most of the neutral civilians for Legends of the Old West.

D10 based! I have a weird fascination for odd dice in games. I find the D6 very restricted in terms of what you can do with it. A D10 is also a better representation of a 100% since you get 10% chance per side of the die. This in my opinion opens up a more structured way of writing rules where things should have a very good or a very slim chance of occurring as well as a large playing field of in between results. Out of the games I have in my collection, the French & Indian war game "This Very Ground" uses D10 and it works phenomenally well.

I hope to share more news about this game with you guys as it nears completion and release.